Amarillo Ramp

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Photo courtesy of Attic 506

Amarillo Ramp 4

Amarillo Ramp was the last piece made by the earthworks artist Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973 while conducting an aerial survey of the site. Smithson, perhaps best-known for his Spiral Jetty sculpture in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, created land works that meditate on our relationship with time, scale, and change. Amarillo Ramp, a 396-foot-long earthen jetty spiraling through the heart of the Texas panhandle, captured the imagination of North Carolina artists and filmmakers Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, who made a film, which screens this week, that is named after the ramp. Today, the land itself has been semi-abandoned and serves as a transcription of change (fracking and power lines, to name just the human interventions).  Gruffatt and Brown shot their experimental film on Super-16mm, drawing close to what they saw as a challenge to encounter “the existential implications of climate change with novel ways of thinking and seeing.”